AgentOps
The engineering discipline of running AI agents in production: state checkpoints, idempotent tool calls, retry budgets, cost guards, evals, and observability around model-driven workflows.
Glossary
The vocabulary of reliable AI systems.
Short, answer-first definitions for the harness concepts that decide whether an agent survives production.
AI agent reliability
The ability of an agent workflow to complete safely and repeatedly despite model drift, tool errors, timeouts, duplicate runs, and partial failures.
Idempotent tool call
A tool call designed so repeating the same operation with the same stable key does not duplicate side effects like emails, database writes, payments, or publishing actions.
MCP server
A Model Context Protocol server that exposes application-specific tools and context to AI agents through a structured, permissioned interface.
Agent harness
The production wrapper around an AI model: tools, permissions, memory, state, checkpoints, routing, evals, recovery, and observability.
Multi-model routing
A system design that sends each task to the model best suited for its cost, latency, context, quality, or safety requirements instead of relying on one model for everything.
Production RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation built for operational use, with source control, freshness checks, permission boundaries, evals, and traceable answers.
Retry budget
An explicit limit on how often an agent may retry a step before escalating, falling back, or stopping to avoid runaway cost and duplicate work.
Checkpoint store
Durable storage for an agent workflow's last known good state, allowing recovery to resume from a safe step instead of starting over.
Human approval gate
A controlled pause before an agent performs a sensitive write, publish, purchase, or external action, giving a human the final decision while preserving the workflow state.
Need these systems in production?
Bonfire Systems designs the harness around agent workflows: MCP servers, state, recovery, evals, and observability.
See capabilities →